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As is so often the case, my colleague and friend Brant Houston has hit the nail on the head. In the last issue of The IRE Journal, Brant’s “From the IRE Offices” column discussed the rapidly deteriorating relationship between journalists and public officials, and highlighted the Kafkaesque world we now inhabit.
Brant was quite right to lay at least some of the blame on the professional ambivalence that has left us flat-footed in the face of outrage after outrage. From the assault on confidential sources to Maryland’s gubernatorial tantrums, the national picture is indeed grim. From my perch at the Freedom of Information Center, I’d like to add another missive from the front lines of press freedom: The press we love is under siege.
Chicken Little, you say? Another tenured radical running around screaming about the First Amendment? Well, I’ll plead guilty to the tenured radical part, but I’m no Chicken Little.
The evidence is overwhelming: The First Amendment, bulwark of liberty, will be tested in the next few years like never before. The hard-fought liberties won in the courtrooms of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s likely will stand the test of time, but we’ll still face fresh outrages every day, as emboldened officials filled with disdain for the very democratic “values” they rail on and on about challenge the very heart of newsgathering.
Bill Moyers, upon retiring from a career spent fighting the powers that be, recently put it this way: “The greatest threat to our industry lies not in the high drama of prior restraint – we won’t see another Pentagon Papers-style showdown, as governments don’t want the PR fallout of true banana republic repression. No, what we are seeing instead are fresh challenges to our ability to gather the news, sprinkled with some good old-fashioned strong-arming. In each instance, with rare exceptions, we’re not raising nearly enough hell when we are silenced, detained, arrested or flakked to death.
“Our meek response to the heavy hand of government began in earnest in those horrible days after the tragedy of 9/11, when, quite understandably, the press was eager to please and terrified of offending readers even if the job occasionally demanded exactly that. The federal government – sensing a rare opportunity to gain the upper hand in information control – concocted a potent mix of secrecy and jingoism, equating tough questions about government policy with no less than sedition.”
Well, the problem is, state and local officials watch television and read newspapers, too, and they follow the lead of Washington when it comes to information control. Soon, we began to see the press facing all manner of official and unofficial intimidation, from statehouses to city council chambers. (For example, see page 12.)
I call it “trickle-down fascism.” Authoritarianism in Washington soon finds its way to the local water board, as everyone becomes ruler of his or her own little fiefdom, wielding power like a modern-day despot, unafraid of the ramifications of the behavior and, more importantly, completely unfazed by trampling on the First Amendment rights of journalists to do their jobs and gather the news.
You might argue that we have always fought these battles, that we have always faced ham-handed locals with no appreciation for First Amendment values. True, but … have you been paying attention lately?
While we all have been paying close attention to the subpoena wars, just look at what the past few months have brought:
• Last spring, The Associated Press sent a reporter to Hattiesburg, Miss., to cover a speech by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. As Scalia spoke, a U.S. Marshal stepped in front of the reporter and demanded that she turn over the digital recording she was making to back up her notes. She tried to say no, but the marshal ignored her and erased Justice Scalia’s words from memory on the spot. The AP bravely fought the heavy-handed marshals, successfully, I might add, and bully for them.
• In February, a New Jersey photojournalist was covering a train derailment near Woodbridge, N.J. When he stepped onto railroad property to try to get a picture of the wreckage, the local police who were controlling access to the scene packed him into a squad car and drove him away.
• On Election Day, journalists covering the presidential election were barred from polling places in several areas of the country and one was arrested for photographing voters outside a polling place in Florida. In Ohio, a federal appeals court overturned media restrictions while a Texas newspaper in President Bush’s hometown reported harassment after endorsing Kerry.
A Florida sheriff’s deputy chased, tackled, punched and arrested a freelance investigative journalist from Long Island who was photographing voters outside of Palm Beach County’s main elections office Sunday afternoon, according to a Palm Beach Post reporter who witnessed the event.
• In Minnesota, a new law required journalists to get letters of approval from city election clerks or county auditors before interviewing at polling sites, where they could remain for a maximum of 15 minutes.
And the numbers grow, seemingly every week. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press recorded about 30 arrests or detainments of journalists in the past two years.
In earlier times our governing bodies tried to squelch journalistic freedom with the blunt instruments of the law – padlocks for the presses and jail cells for outspoken editors and writers. Over time, with spectacular wartime exceptions, the courts and the Constitution struck those weapons out of their hands.
We have the weapons to fight trickle-down fascism, and it is no less than our duty to do so. It’s never easy, nor popular, to stand up to the local despot, at the height of his power, but never has it been so important. We must fight every unconstitutional infringement of the right to gather news, in every locality, every day. Only consistent, dogged determination will beat back the forces of repression, which seemingly never take a day off from their quest to silence us.
Charles Davis is executive director of the Freedom of Information Center, an associate professor at the Missouri School of Journalism and a member of IRE’s First Amendment task force.
